Salt burns against your tongue. Wind howls like a pack of hungry wolves in your waterlogged ears, the roar of a vicious storm all around you as waves crash and roll across the writhing ocean. Your lungs claw for air, between the surf rolling you through the water, desperate for oxygen in those precious moments of reprieve.
You waste time, screaming into the vicious wind for help that is not coming. Your eyes burn from the vicious salt water. Your tiny ship is gone, broken by the vicious tide.
No driftwood to cling to, no barrel for you to teeter in.
A wave plunges you under, muscles weak and drained from the cold of the ocean sapping your strength, lungs filling slowly with water each time you are plunged. You have nothing left to give the world.
You never had much to begin with, all it’s done is take and take and take from you. Here again, it’s taken the final thing you have to give.
Your name is Carissa Decimus, and you are about to die.
You sink, lungs burning, thrashing meekly against your fate. No one will remember you. The title you’d taken, the name you’d begun to make for yourself will live in vague legend, but you will never rise to the heights you should.
And as the black trickles into your vision, voices ring in your head.
“This is one of many threads, you cannot save her, for you are not real here,” the first voice booms with power and prophecy, cutting through the black. “I told you what this would be, do you wish to continue on, knowing this pain will repeat infinitely?”
The second is softer, acheing in some way in how it wraps around your heart. “Am I strong enough? With the events with the Witch of the Sun, I feel so but… I am still raw in so many little ways.”
A shakey breath rings in your fading mind.
“Show me. No matter how much I scream, how much I howl, do not stop. Do not let go,” the second voice trembles, with the fear, with the pain, with the ache of something horrible.
You don’t know why, but in these last few seconds before the end, you wish you could hold that voice close, shield her from the unknown terror to come.
And then, you drown.
Three note chimes ring in your sylvan ears, the penthouse symbol lighting up. You, Medea of Colchis, have arrived at the top floor of a complex mainframe plugged right into the heart of three massive skyscrapers filled to the brim with computer servers draped with the haunted ghosts of three deities of times past— all harnessed to drive a human seeress to unfathomable heights of clairvoyant prediction.
It seems blasphemous in a way, for this much power to exist, to predict outcomes that should flow naturally, all in an attempt to change them.
Metal doors slide open before you to reveal a glimmering cyberpunk nexus evoking the feel of a tremendous, neon magmachamber. Hundreds of arcing lava tubes wind in and out of carefully sculpted metal. You look up, as determined feet carry your body forward, eyes roving across the ceiling. The forgework is astonishing, stretching up at least a hundred meters around a central dip in the chamber, three massive consoles ringing tripart stairs.
Once you thought the Nornir a smokescreen, a cleverly constructed lie to hide a greater scheme. Yet now you need its applications. The one who holds power over you will turn all the possibilities against you.
Your mother wants to break you. With all the power of her control over time and blood. She wants to make you hers once more. She will use anything against you, which is why you're here.
You descend through the cyberpunk matrix of volcanic evocation with slow, reverent steps, admiring the purposeful construction in the art of mother nature. Orange and red neon undertones bloom against the blackened metal architecture, the occasional motes of blue running in complement beneath them.
The colors are a sharp contrast to the lilac, glyphic marks, sigils, and symbols of your native tongue writhing on your olive skin. Such obfuscation as you wear now is out of protection, no, shame of your heritage, of what you were meant to be.
A philactory for lich who just won't let go.
You halt at the top of the stairs, glancing around with a furrowing of the brow, fully expecting the speaker to be already present.
But you’re alone.
Seconds tick by into minutes. Is this a trap? you wonder.
She announces herself with the click of a cane against tile, not coming from within the chamber as you expected, but from behind you.
You turn to greet her, only to pale in the face, a chill arcing up your spine. Disbelief hangs from the parted opening of your jaw. The heart of the Nornir, their speaker, is a ghost from the past.
A woman, at least 1.8 meters tall, olive skinned with brown hair that reaches her feet in a braid. She taps a cane as she slowly approaches where you stand.
Her clothes are surprisingly simple, and casual given her stature and history. Barefoot, jeans, and a graphic T-shirt.
But it’s the eyes that catch your attention, as they did so long ago. Dark brown with a wash of grey across the surface. Blind. As she’s always been.
Her ontokinetic aura, unfolding in your sixth hidden sense, is startling. It towers towards the ceiling, bright and seeping with the ides of a divinity who once cursed her. The obfuscation that hides you is pointless in the face of her presence. She’ll see through all of your facades so easily.
Or well, no not quite see.
“Cassandra,” the words slip from your lips before you can stop them. “You-“
She cocks her head slightly to one side and interrupts you.
“Alive? Yes. Hello, Medea. I foresaw your arrival.” She smiles with a soft but slightly impish grin, it fades as quickly as it comes. “You should go home to your Wife, it's your anniversary and Carissa is surely waiting." A pause. "There is nothing but pain for you here.”
The depths of what she has seen dance in her eyes. It's impossible not to see that she’s had this conversation hundreds of times. Sometimes with jokes and banter to ease you into friendliness, reminiscence and bliss before attempting to deny you.
Where this reunion should be joyful, it is instead marred by ichor of your deep past, and how much you need what she has to give.
“You know that will not convince me.” You stand tall, imperious, despite the aching throbbing in your chest for a more proper for reconnection with your old friend. Craving jokes about her sight in place of this dismissal.
She sags at the shoulders, leaning forwards and showing her age. “Yes, but it was worth the try to dissuade you, and I shall not stop.” She pauses and frets with her cane. “What you seek, is unpleasant. You have seen what such desire can do firsthand.”
Every hair stands on the back of your neck. You fight your phisology with gritting of teeth to stop your eyes widening, but it fails. You shouldn’t be surprised that she’s seen it. You should have expected it. That doesn’t make it any less alarming.
What else has she seen about me?
Does she know fully what my mother was trying to do? Should I ask? Has she told anyone about that incident? About me?
“Have you—”
“I am many things Medea, a snitch is not one. The Foundation will never know.” You shift, and you can only assume she hears the uncertainty in the bones. “Her fate is the fate of all who are not blessed in depth with the sight, including your forebears. Beware it.”
You purse your lips and cross your arms, not wholly convinced by her statement, but the look behind her sightless eyes tell at least a facsimile of the truth.
“I know what it did to her. What it did to them. We’re not the same or after the same thing.”
“The danger remains all the same, especially for one who holds the might of time in her hands.”
A chill runs up your spine, hairs standing up on the neck.
“Can you be more specific?” the fear in your voice bounces around in your skull. Tightens your chest like a vice.
She smiles, Its one of her cruel, prophetic smiles, dripping in the light with a hot wax of foreboding you can almost feel. There’s no joy in her eyes. “No, that is the problem. This goes afoul as many ways as it does not.”
Very suddenly her tone dives into ominous seriousness, absolute in its assuredness as she grows to tower over you. You step back, almost falling down the stairs with the abruptness of it, cursing the lack of bodily control in this moment.
“The sight is a terrible thing Medea, I would not wish it upon you or your foul kin or the foulest of those who brought me to my knees in our long history. It is unforgiving, cruel, and everlasting in what it shows us. I live with the haunts of past, present, and future, the drowning tides of endless blood and will until the end of all things!”
As quickly as the mood takes her, it fades again.
She shrinks, seeming very small, leaning on her cane. Much older than when I looked at her before.
Old and very tired. She has foreseen something that she could not stop. It aches in her eyes, her movement, her bones. Settled heavily on her like chains bound around her neck.
She has lost love.
“I am sorry Cassandra.” That ache burning in empathic fury in your chest is so intensely familiar in recent days, the helplessness of love being snatched away from you, powerless to stop it from coming on.
The tight cinch about your spinal chord, the constriction of your bronchea, and manic bottomless pit in your stomach. Helpless and twisted around again and again by a mother who never cared for who you are. It’s why you’re here. To see how many ways the beginnings could have gone so very wrong. How she could have won, taken everything from you both.
Because in your next steps she will use that knowledge to bring you to your knees. To make you squirm on the floor of her palace as she takes back her philactery, takes you back.
“My mind is set. Will you help me, or will I have to seek out the mirror.”
The ancient seeress sighs and then begins grumbling, showing signs of that old friend I once knew. “Always doomed not to be listened to, even by the new Hecate herself.”
“You are growing disagreeable in your old age.”
“Quiet youngling or you’ll taste my cane.”
There’s a moment of tension between us.
Then you both laugh. You've won. Cassandra descends the stairs. She beckons, in the wrong direction, for you to follow, and you do, curiosity overwhelming the trembling hands and feet that hesitate, the trill in your spine of trepidation.
“Have you ever seen before? And I don’t mean my drapes in the corner.”
You turn to look at the corner and realize too late you've been had by the old hag. Cassandra barks out in laughter.
“That time, that time the trap was sprung.”
“Do you even need that cane, I bet after all these millennia you have full echolocation.” A devious grin takes to my lips. “Maybe we should experiment and see if you can dodge my hands.”
“You wouldn’t dare hit a blind, old helpless lady.”
“Helpless, Hecate’s sacred fires, I’ve seen what you can do.”
“Entirely flukes, I assure you,” she lies through her teeth. I just laugh.
“No, I’ve never seen before, and though I would love to hear how it works, the anxiety is killing me. I would love to hear an explanation another time?” I ask, getting us back on track for the third time.
“Impatient too.” She sighs and then touches the device. “Are you sure you wish to go through with this?”
Grinding your teeth together in growing agitation with her continued attempts to delay and deny you, you simply nod and let it all go.
“Then take my hand, and we shall see what could have been.”
Dark is coming.
The air stings against your tiny form in the dim twilight of fading sunrays. Shapes, indeterminate and many float through the small opening of the strange soft substance wrapped around your tiny shape, barely keeping you warm. Sound, temperature, the rough scraping of tiny limbs through the wrap on hard rock, painful hunger, all these and more assault tiny senses too new to properly process everything as anything more than pain and discomfort.
The smell of musty autumn decay wafts through your tiny nostrils, crickets chirping in the distance, the sound of a stream burbling nearby.
You scream, a high pitched, shrill cry, shape wriggling, trying to reach and find a mother who is not here. Tiny tears worm down chubby cheeks increasing the sting of the salty cold on your skin. You’re too young, too small and new to the world to understand that you’ve been left here, unwanted, destined to die.
You’ve been abandoned, on a rock in the moonlight, the son of the king of Lycurgus hated you for being a girl.
With every passing minute the shrill strength of your cries diminishes, but it’s too late to prolong your life for a few more precious hours. Something has come, moving toward you in the periphery of your gaze. Black textured flesh presses up against your face, air sucking inwards.
Teeth. Fire, overwhelming pain that spreads coursing through your body in pools of sickly crimson that splatter ev—
Black. Ice-cold water bursts past, stripping the blanket from your form in a neverending river that stretches towards distant shores lit by huge blue-green undulating shapes, burning and casting light. You flail uselessly against the current, screaming, dunking under, lungs filling with the life-sapping ichor.
Tossed and tumbling, the shape of your form ripples through orbs of light floating in the eternal stream, images and twirls of remembered sensation sloughing in your skull. You have no conceptualization of language, higher thought, critical examination, only instinct screaming to fly, to run, to fight as Ends take you, shatter your form in pain and showers of crimson vitality.
Here in this muddled maelstrom, icey blades of sorrow carve hollows in your rapidly growing chest. Through each absorbed fate something rises on the edge of sliding pieces that are becoming your conscious mind. Voices, growing with familiarity.
“In many threads, she never survives the night.” The first is a middling tone, prophetic and whimsical not that you know these terms. It whispers softly in your skull. “In these threads your fate is—”
“I know,” there is deep sadness in the intonation of the second voice, soaked in lilac melancholy and a fervent harmony that momentarily soothes the ache of your frozen soul.
It’s not enough.
You scream, unable to look for the source as you tumble off the edge of a steep cliff to a burning glow far below—
Breath rolls heavily from your lungs, muscles burning with fire as a drum pounds in a five-year-old chest. Fingers and toenails scrape against dirt and rock carrying you on all fours towards the distressed roars of your mother, brown and green whipping by snatching at the crimson curls of your locks. Fear curling along your skin in raised bumps and tall standing hair.
Your littermates all fled, to caves or climbing trees, leaving only you to come to her rescue.
Bursting through a clearing in the brush, roaring in a deep throaty scream as the trees and green fall away. Your mother backed up against steep cliffs, surrounded by strange tall hairless creatures that look just lik—
Something cold and sharp slams into you, the momentum knocking your legs out from under you. Electric heat and fire curl where your back smacks into the dirt.
Something is wrong. Your vision is strange, as if you’re only looking from one side, a smoothed twig ending in yellow jutting strands juts from the right in your peripheral vision. The hairless things look on at you, faces like yours in the shapes and reflections of water. Warmth, fire, pressure and sticky liquid trickle on the right side of your face. A shaky hand, your hand, moves to press against the twig, twists an—
Through black, endless depths swirling around a body that’s yours and yet not. You’re stitched in varying pieces that aren’t quite recognizable, a patchwork of nonsense images that refuse to mesh. Throbbing with reminders that stick in a disoriented mind clawing for purchase or understanding.
Too slow, too late, too small and weak to stop them.
Bursts of startling light smash through you with moments of choking warmth that burns as fire in simmering nerves. The body shifts around you, growing, changing, stitching on new patches with each jolt of instant paint, or quiet, agonizing silence.
Marble columns carved from immense stone monoliths of green-tinged stone blur in the distance, the roar of the Icey River of death rocketing up towards you agai—
“No! I won’t.” Words hiss from your lips, the forest arching out in spindles of green, brown, grey, white. Wind blows flutters of red and yellow leaves. “I won’t kill anything!”
He glares at you with steely grey eyes, a wirey, thin man with thick muscle in places that describe is hunting profession. Hair greying, beard thick and peppered with speckes of the mornings meal.
“Useless Red.” The slap sends you sprawling in the dirt, flesh stinging from the blow. “When I tell you to do something you do it—” You brace for a kick, an onset of blows that never comes, tongues of rage burning in your eight-year-old chest.
You have a name now, but that doesn’t matter because he’s going to beat you to death.
“Master don’t! She doesn’t know how to use a bow.” Picking yourself up off the ground, your friend stands, arms extended, shielding you with her form. Dark of hair, thin in shape, and green of eyes, her name, like yours, is not a name, but a description.
“Out of the way Black.” His voice is softer, with a tinge of gentleness in its tone with her, but holds the growl on his tongue. “She needs the lesson.”
The standoff stretches for an eternity before he grunts, and turns away. The great stag you refused to kill, glorious in the ray of sun remains. He aims.
Black turns to you, but you’re already on your feet. A thousand ways this could go, end him early with a snatched arrow through the neck, carve his chest with the knife.
But you’re young, impulsive, and dumb. The first application of the displacement ever, ends with you startling the stag as the great void fades away. Whistling sharply fills still recovering ears. Something jerks the body and neck to the side, a moment of numb confusion.
Something Jagged. Something Alien, forming a cavity, a puncture in a place it shouldn’t be.
You try to breathe. Warm, stifling liquid pours int your lungs, diaphragm desperately pumping. A scream cuts through the air, a shout following it. “Moron! Fucking idiot! Look at what she did, I’ll have to find a new fucking slave!”
Fierce whipping agony storms your oxygen starved grey-matter, vision fraying at the edges and filling with black. A hand presses to your chest, another grasping your own. The last thing in the frame of your fading sight is your first friend, your first dark-haired crush, and the fucking hunter who put you in chains.
For a moment, the river’s currents pound in your ears, carrying you on your back.
Shapes now on the riverbank, silhouettes of darkness watching, boring holes into your jigsawed shape. As strength leaches from your acheing muscles, you thrash, fight against it, not ready to give in to a fate you don’t deserve.
“Who’s that?” the melancholic voice from before rings in your tilting skull. It’s curiosity bleeding through, filling your spirit with the strange strength of memory. You remember the voice, and all the times it has spoken so far. A her, you decide, as you struggle against death’s delirium, oxygen starvation from being dunked repeatedly setting in.
You tumble in the water, flipping upright and see a hug jut of rock towering from the river. Fingers catch and snag in the crevices, body jerking around. You climb, desperate to escape. Sickly green arms, hands, and alien limbs reach from the water, the other mournful dead trying to drag you back in.
“You’ll come to know,” the prophetic voice declares in response.
Gasping, clinging to the cold stone, shivering. “Can someone help me?” You call. No response comes. The flash of memory of what you did, how asinine it was, stings against your chest. Hot daggers burrow into your belly, shame of your inept stupidity blazing across your cheeks. How could you be so thoughtlessly impulsive?
The stone cracks, drawing the widening of your eyes. It shatters, dragging you back down into the reaches, sucked forward into a powerful whirlpool with lights at the bottom. Can something already dead d—
“Carissa, why?” Black’s voice echoes in your ears. Everything throbs with hot paint. Your eyes open in tiny slits, face swollen and bruised. Propped up by a pile of hay. You’re in a coop, old and ratty. It’s barely held together with boards and mesh rope doors, filled with sleeping chickens.
“I couldn’t let him touch like that,” you gasp out with what little strength you can manage. You finally have a real name, and it was given to you by the man who did this. Bleeding from many places and soaking into the messy bed of straw and grass that serves as a pitiful bed beneath your bloodied and broken body.
“But now you’re so badly hurt cause of me,” she bursts into tears and your heart tears apart. Life is pain, and no matter how many blankets she covers you with, you can’t get warm. Too swollen, too acheing to move.
“No, no it’s not cause of you. It’s him. It’s always his fault. Please remember that Black,” voice fades into coughs, as blood flecks your lips.
Tears burst from your ten-year-old eyes, wondering if you could have ever had a better life. The shared memories of the jigsaw seep into your skull, reminding you that no, so far, no life has been better than this.
As the warmth and life saps from your broken form, the melancholic voice from the river draws breath in your skull. A powerful heart drumming in your ears. Emotion, sensation that isn’t yours burns, acheing and hurt deep in your chest as the wet, icey cold sinks in.
Age brings physical skill, and though the river drags against your flesh, pulling its strength apart, your will is hardening. You swim, long, hard strokes against the current, tearing off the dead hands that try to pull apart your jigsaw at the seams.
Nothing makes sense, the lights filling your bones with acheing pains, stitching patterns in your flesh. With each that ripples through you, you’re spun about like a top, disoriented, pushed back from the shore you strive towards.
“Is this what it was like? What she was long before she became the woman I loved?” the melancholy has deepened, into open sadness in the lilt of her pitch. It chews against the walls of your lungs, wraps your heart with lilac string and drags it into a pit forming in your stomach.
You reach, unconsciously, in its direction, wanting to hold and drown her sadness. Take her from this pain she’s living in this sudden shared memory spiking in your skull.
It nearly breaks you when there is nothing physical to hold.
“Just like all those people beneath my mother’s thumb. I guess I always knew from when we talked but—”
A great beast rips from the deathly river, gleaming with light and snatches you down its gullet.
You lay face down in the dirt, unable to get up. A crowd stands around you, face swelling, feet and fists pounding into your flesh in kicks, punches, and slams as one boy drops and cracks your ribs in several spots.
The dark haired girl with whom you are fast friends and harboring a secret budding crush that isn’t yet grasped, tries to get them off you. Grabbing, pulling, shoving. Everything is pain as black creeps in at the edges of your swelling eyelids, the world doubling and tripling.
For a moment, there are phantoms in the corners of your vision, two women you don’t know.
One of the assailants rounds on the friend whose name you can’t recall in these dying moments, and smashes her in the face with a targeted fist.
How fucking cruel. Is the last thing you think before the black. What you don’t see is her weeping tears, the first to see your form completely still.
In the last vestiges before light streams in, you hear that second voice again. “This, all of this before we ever met.” In the depths between her tears reach you, flashes of trembling hands.
“Who are you?” You cry into the black. “Why cry for me? Why don’t you fucking help?”
But they can’t hear you.
The noon mediterranean sun hangs heavy over the olive orchard just outside the town. You wield a large hunting knife in one hand, your fist balled. Snarls pour from your throat, muscles beginning to show in your young form.
Those older boys glare you down. You’ve put yourself between your first crush, the woman you want to love forever.
“I know that look on her face. That righteous fury.” You remember this voice again, that soft and melodic voice. Its similar to the voice of your friend, and you wonder for a moment if its her in the shadows?
Your grip around the knife tightens, determined to protect her. For a moment, the ferocity of your gaze looks to drive off your torturers.
“I—I didn’t know she had a first love,” the second voice gasps out in your ears, and tears run down your cheeks as its sadness bleeds into you.
“She almost never survives,” the first voice shocks you into fury as you scream at the boys.
One lunges at you.
“And what if she had?” the second wonders through its sadness. “Would she have ever left?”
You let the punch slide by on one cheek and plunges the knife into his belly. A punch smashes your right orbital, and the yell that comes with it is ferocious. Pivoting your hungry knife jabs the boy in the side three times. The third grabs you by your hair. Sky and ground tumble as you’re flung through the air, rolling in the dirt. His steps echo with thuds, and you know he’s fucked up.
You roll again, and then pop up and stab him in the belly.
The knife he was holding, hidden until this final moment, plunges through your heart.
You go down together, a knife cut to his throat. But it’s done, you fall to the ground there among the olives, first love weeping over you.
The second voice gasps down air in your ears, tears arcing on your dying cheeks from your mixing grief. Realizing that this is not only your end, but one of the few where the one you first loved goes on.
Your experience fractures here in a thousand different ways. An old grungy man speaks in muffled tones to a you when you’re not more than at least sixteen.
Through the shared memory you hear the second memory speak about knowing you truly now. Indignant fire burns against your mind, hair a mane of blood, knife pressed to your back.
It plunges through your spine in one fractal. You die, paralyzed.
In another you mistime a blink fused in a wall. You die, stabbed through the face.
You miss the bowshot, he stabs you through the heart. You die, heart stopping.
In all of them the second unseen phantom’s heart pounds in your ears. Her sobbing frozen sadness rippling through your darkening gaze. Somehow, you know she can’t look away, and you wish you could help her.
“The odds of us being meant for each other shrink by the second as every death is a blow to my skull. To my heart. To the idea that we were meant to be in every thread across space and time.”
You reel in delirium, knowing these are thoughts rather than her speech. Acheing to know what she means by being together, but knowing in these threads where you die you’ll never truly know.
You’re older now, around seventeen.
The ambush in your camp in Calydon, stabbed through the back. You are dead on your belly like an animal.
Through the stomach, acid eating you apart in septic agony. You are dead again, septic shock.
In the heart. You've danced this story before, and you'll do it many more.
They’re jealous of you, contenders seeking all the glory for themselves in a hunt yet to come.
You don’t understand why humans are fucking like this. You hate them, but you never remember this hate in full till the end.
You flicker like a wave, turning over in broad brush strokes. A flat, rocky marsh plain high in the hills. A boar, big as the largest horses ever dreamed of, screaming at you.
You die, swept aside by a sideward lash of tusks.
How could you be so frustratingly slow.
You die, crushed beneath heavy hooves, skull obliterated.
Impaled in a charge, mistiming the roll. You are dead, bleeding out carried about the field by the vicious monster.
An arrow burrowing through your skull. Your death is instant, black.
Arrow through the heart, blood oozing down your front as you hit the marsh.
Straight through the throat. You are dead again, choking on your own crimson flesh.
You are too fucking slow. Take too long, and let your competitors get close. All that training, all that practice, wasted on you. How could you be this incompetent?
Blood and sulphur and musk of a far too large animal fill your nostrils as you gasp down breath with the second voice. There’s motion in the corner of your eyes, some unseen force staggering forward. As it smashes you aside to die, you see the phantoms through blurred vision, the taller one yanking the shorter back.
“N-n-n-o, they can’t all be like this!” the second voice screams in your head, gasping down breath through your punctured lungs, and weeping for her.
“They are. They’re all like this.” You gasp out with your final breaths, “But maybe they aren’t for you.” You desperately hope, and realize in this space where that shared memory returns. You’re falling in love with a voice, a thing you’ll never know. "BUT PLEASE DO SOMETHING TO HELP ME!" You scream.
It says nothing back to acknowledge you. There’s no comfort for you here in death.
“How long will this go? How many different fates did we have to avoid for us to meet.” The voice thinks in your skull as you sink deep in the waves.
“Many,” the first voice says aloud.
A great serpent of silver scales rips you from the water.
It devours you in a single bite, showering the ocean with rapidly diluted crimson.
In the throes of the blackened river Styx, vision quadrupling, you see the phantoms. The second with a hand over her mouth. Fingers drag you under, pulling you back towards the light and a forced endless path it seems.
Enslaved by pirates who rescue you from the depths, you die slowly, weeks later, from malnutrition.
Worked to death rowing oars.
You escape!
And die with a green blade in your back.
Your chest torn open with sharpened copper.
Your stomach cut out. You die minutes later, writhing on the bloodied deck to cruel laughter.
Again in the water, fished from the sea but this time is different. This is the beginning of where you should come to make your name. Strange people with fins and scales fishing you from the water. The Finnfolk, saving you from a drowning fate.
They misunderstand you, cleave you through with tridents and blades of strange make. The deaths are many.
Rips you to pieces with bare hands and knuckles. Your death comes when they take too many limbs, too much skin.
As you lay dying on the deck, wallowing in the brutal cruelty of continued repeating fate, the second voice’s horror leaches through into you.
Some strange sense of knowing now, that you’ll never meet her, that this dooms her as much as it does you. You ache in those final moments for time to rewind, in all these shared memories. This is not supposed to happen, but it does in some of these threads you’re beginning to understand. She’s beginning to understand.
Her screams echo in you with every death, a sense of surging forward, only to be snatched back by the first voice.
And then, you meet her. The shared memory triggering at the sound of her voice, as the burning love, slowly building and being shared across many lives, rises in you.
“Hey there’s someone in the water!” These memories burn in your skull, excitement and love in your belly. And then you feel the second voice. Her dread, as they fish the one you are now sure you’re in love with from the sea.
Frozen in place. Watching as they fish this strange, pointy-eared, beautiful creature from the tiny raft left by a storm that took an entire fleet from its occupant.
The hatred, vile, disgusted look she gives your awkward excited gaze. She shatters your heart and expectations, turning her nose up at you, ordering you to perform menial tasks.
Insulting you.
“Useless slave.” “Livestock for the font of power.” “Ratty creature beneath me.” “Just another worthless, meatsack of a human.” We hated, insulted, lashed at each other in these first months.
“How much I was like my Mother then. How close I was to growing into what she wanted me to be, right into her trap, right into her vestiges,” The second voice laments through your mind.
You don’t understand. This isn’t what you thought would happen when you met the second voice. You feel her nausea, how it seeps into your stomach. How sick you feel in this moment. It almost drives you and her to puking.
Then your hot rage at the dehumanizing, speciest, bullshit. The insults you toss back at her when you learn what she really is.
“Pointy eared freak.” “Blood drinking bitch.” “Loud mouthed Witch.” "Purple eyed, blood sucking, flat chested, elf who'd die within three seconds of being dropped alone in the woods."
Nausea overwhelms the second voice, and you feel her leaning forward, as if right over your shoulder to avoid watching. Through the connection, feeling her distress, you know what it does in response. It reorients so she can’t look away, and you blame yourself for this torture foisted on her, as much as you blame the world for torturing you in these moments of shared memory. Through your strange connection you glimpse her memories, what she might have done.
But it does not save you, as she screams in horror in your head, as that unseen force tries to tear you away from what is coming.
Her name is Medea. A name she took inspite of you using it to mock her.
She stabs you, with a knife in the dark, carving your chest with strange foreign marks. You are dead, a sacrifice for some hateful god.
Dumps your body overboard while you are asleep. You don't yet know the irony of this fate.
In the throes of death you glimpse flashes of fate through the other end, the voice you’re in love with’s fate in the palace, warped as her mother takes h—
You scream in horror.
You vomit in the final moments as you choke on poison fed to you in the hold.
Her retching on the other end becomes yours as in the agony of death you see the taller phantom outline snatch your Medea back.
Forced to listen to manic laughs of glee from this dark Medea that you don’t know.
“I want to peel off my skin, rip out my eyes, cut myself in a thousand small agonizing places to purge these dark, horrible fates from my mind!” your Medea cries in your ears.
“Please, don’t!” you beg on your knees in the shallows of the eternal darkened river.
She strangles you, snuffing out your spark with ropes of blood. How many times will the one you thought you'd love, kill you?
Exsanguinates you in a quiet hidden place. Will your torture never end?
Tears you to pieces in a million small different ways. Why do you die in the dark like this?
“I knew I was a monster then, but I never got the chance to do this. My control was better than that, because maybe I realized, something was wrong with my opinion. I can’t imagine doing this, I can’t imagine killing her like this. Being that monster.”
You don’t understand, through these shared memories how you fell in love with someone this monstrous. Why fate is this cruel to you.
You want to scream at her to make it all stop as you lay bleeding out on the deck, watching her and the voice of the second phantom stand over you. But your throat is gone, and you die again.
“But here in these threads I did. I killed her. I, not my mother, not someone else. This is what I was barreling towards, this is what she wanted me to be.”
She falls to her knees before you, this phantom, holding onto the taller one's hands, weeping, as the river sweeps you under again.
Your story is like a dream beyond those threads where she kills you again and again. You hate her, this Medea that you once considered yours, and the monster she made. She’s indignant, flippant, defiant, a mirror of her mother according to the voice you wish you could tear out of your skull.
She did this to you, somehow you grow more sure of it with every passing fate. She's not worth your fucking love.
But that's the trick, isn't it. Fate's twisted game.
She changes. On the path through your journey with the Finnfolk, you see her image of the world shatter in the face of exposure to different peoples, places, races, and times. Your deaths abruptly stop, for reasons you can't comprehend.
You welcome this desperate reprieve.
You pretend you don’t notice her world shattering, her change, but you can’t help it. It’s not the shared memories; those fade as do the second voice with the lack of death. But not her feelings. Not your feelings. There is something you are inexplicably drawn to. But you pretend not to be, because fuck her for what she put you through.
No matter how much you tell yourself otherwise, you can’t escape it. As you grow stronger, more confident in who you are, in putting the pain in the past. She squabbles with you, flings biting insults, hate even. You’re not blind, she’s more like you than you care to admit.
She masks it with all of this feigned hate to bury what she really feels. You catch her in moments when she thinks you’re not looking.
Admiration in her eyes.
It twists your stomach into knots with strange fluttering wings.
“I remember this, I remember feeling the need to mask a growing admiration of her principles, her inner strength, power, and growing physique. She was what I wanted to be, strong, independent, self sufficient and reliant.”
You were many things. You suppose everything the voice said in your mind, and more. But you never truly felt it. Not after your early years.
But no matter how much you tell yourself otherwise, the obvious truth stands before you. You’re falling in love.
“But I was so deep in denial. How could I love a woman? I was meant to bear children, wasn’t I? That is the way of my people, the way to power…” You recoil at the thoughts. Is this how she felt in these moments hiding and spying? Those moments of denial, and insults.
“She woke me up, there in the depths before the heart of the gardener at the end of creation.”
You relive that moment of awakening a thousand times, in a thousand separate ways. Her unending mind towering above us, oh so carefully holding Medea in her grasp.
“Why is it showing me this?” the second voice gasps to the first.
“Because you need it. Nothing more or less.”
Time folds forwards as the deaths return again, but you barely register these as happening to you. In fact, it almost feels like you're watching another. Something has happened, this cognition of independent existence. You're a gestalt of all that came before, existing both inside these yous, and out. A spectral patchwork of you, increasingly marked by the sites of each individual demise.
Obliterated by the conceptual mass of the Odr as they fall to the fields. Again, you're too fucking slow after all this time.
Impaled upon the spires of troy. You are dead once more.
A thousand horrible fates that seem much farther away now.
Each outcome shatters more of this Medea who both is and isn't yours. A heart falling to smoldering cinders that burns against the shared memories of your dying minds.
Then comes the dreaded Jason, the source of so much pain you didn't know was to come, but now it rockets you back into that prison of torturous flesh.
Out of jealousy by hunters who were with you in Calydon. You are dead.
Like Calydon, out of fear of a woman.
Out of misogynistic cruelty and jeering and in places where Jason uses you as a fucking human shield. You are dead so many times it blurs together in fits of writhing fire.
He should have died each time, not her. Not the men he really sent to their deaths. Medea seethes and burns in your mind, hateful fire dancing through your shared mental connection. You’re not sure now, if you’re real. You’re not sure if she’s real or if this, the memories are all the shared delusion of your mind across time and space.
Then, we are there. The second voice’s desperation burns in my belly, as she turns to the first phantom. You’ve heard enough to have an idea of what she’s dreading, and it fills you fully the cruelty of her possible deaths.
“I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to see this Cassandra, please,” she begs, desperately, Your chest tightens with terror at what potential agony and horror is about to flow.
Cassandra, the one you met at troy. What strange bedfellows in this desperate moment.
Everything clicks into place as you piece together what’s happening through the shared connection points.
You don’t exist. You’re the projection, the continuous consciousness of endless Dead Ends meshing together. She’s real, and you will never know her like you want to because she is examining all the threads where you are doomed to die. No matter how much you love her, you’re going to die. You're going to viscerally live every single one of these potential threads and she doesn't even know you're here. The Medea you can physically hold, the one who you’re meant to be with is doomed to die or never know you.
You scream at the realization, cry, and try to run from the Argo, flee this horrible fate. But the sight has you, binds you to fate, and you run straight into what comes next.
“You told me not to stop, and Fate has us now dear,” Cassandra says softly.
You feel Medea’s eyes jam shut through the connection, you shut yours too. But then they are open again, then shut, then open again staring head, shutting again, open, shut, open shut, open, onwards into infinity.
She reverts to her mother’s influence. Your love wasn't enough.
You, and Jason and all the rest before they ever set foot on shore, are dead in a storm of blood impalement.
A storm of branches and leaves, leaving you a tree of golden beauty in her groves.
You are dead, crimson tides spearing you all through in a million different scarlet ways.
She lures you, chains you, sacrifices you upon the altar before the fountain, surrounded by the sacred golden Orchard of her home. Chanting to the font, dancing, covered in your blood and power, in the sacred plaza before the ritual mount.
Through the connection she heaves, retches and vomits as you lay dying. As you heave and retch in symapthetic coordination.
“No, no no no, I don’t want this. I never wanted this.”
“BUT YOU CHOSE TO SEE IT!” You scream into the black, not understanding why she chose this way.
She screams. Screams, trying to break Cassandra’s grip, trying to escape this nightmare. For a moment, you hope she succeeds, so that you stop existing. So that this madness ends.
She greets you on the rivers, in the golden orchards of Colchis, not as herself. As her mother.
You retch in the black icey river, falling down, kneeling on the river-bottom as the conceptual threads burn around you both through the linkages.
Her as her mother, she as her, takes you for herself.
You don’t know, you’re madly in love with her but you don’t know.
She uses you in many different ways, laughing in her Mother’s voice. Relishing in the prize your Medea loved. You love and hate her for this, for everything you’re being put through.
Why is she still doing this?! You scream into the void.
“I don’t know what she saw in this masculine, pathetic excuse for a woman. But I shall make it mine,” Ilya proclaims as you writhe and screams when you realize what has been done to your Medea.
“She thought me lesser for loving a woman, for loving a woman who was masculine in her eyes. She says these things, knows that some part of me still exists within her, fragmented and dying, and weeping at what she is doing.”
A thousand ways she uses you, takes you for her own until she’s sated.
Then she straps you to the altar, slits your throat in the font’s sacred dance, taking you for her power. You die, a tool for further oppression.
I can’t do this. Her thoughts bleed through into yours.
THEN MAKE IT STOP! you beg her, hoping she’ll hear you.
But she doesn’t. You might as well be mute. You don't exist to her, and it shatters you again and again.
“STOP!” she screams at Cassandra. The seeress doesn’t listen.
Again and again she kills you as herself.
As her mother.
As their scarlet puppet.
She can’t see you by the time it finally carries you both to the Argo.
Burnt to cinders by the fire breathing oxen. There's nothing left but ashes.
Swallowed in a single gulp. You are dead by the Colchian dragon.
Her eyes are blinded with tears, red and raw from trying to claw them out, only to be stopped by Cassandra as her wounds rapidly heal from the power of the stored blood in her robe.
“I’m revolting, disgusting, and I want to tear myself apart.”
“You could have stopped this by never doing it at all!” You cry into the wind as the Argo sails, a moment of freedom from the fates that bind all of you in these dying threads. She still doesn't hear you.
“I am a vessel for evil, doomed in so many threads. We weren’t meant to be at all.”
“Why?!” She cries in my skull.
Jason drags you from the depths of the Argo’s decks, ties you to a rock. You're about to die, when you should spring forth both your futures.
Medea drowns, again and again, stomach pitting with dread that spreads in you as you realize how torturous this is for her, as much as it is for you. Knowing what comes after this. Knowing that, through these threads, she would have had nothing left.
“This was a mistake. This will tear me apart.” You gasp down breath with her, grind your teeth. Finally, she does something, she tries to look away, tries to tear her arm from Cassandra’s grip.
None of it works, Cassandra has her tight. And you hear the words as your thrust back into the body, snatched away from the Styx.
“You’ll pay for this you yellow eyed, snake bellied bastard,” you sneer at Jason.
“Oh no, I won’t. Hera, my dear Atalante, is on my side. Medea is mine, and I simply can’t keep you around with her constantly making lovey dovey eyes at you. Oh, chin up and stop looking so red in the face.” He grabs your chin, sneering. You want to rip his guts out, stuff his head up his own ass.
“Fuck you. I’m going to survive this; I’m going to find you when I get back to shore. Skin you alive, slowly but surely, tie you up, and display you where the whole world can see what a fucking coward you are.”
But you know you won’t already, even if in the moment you feel so. He has you in the palm of his hand, and the dread rides high in the tide of your belly. He prolongs your end, relish in the fear in your eyes that you try to hide.
Jason pats your cheek, the wood of the boat creaking beneath his sandals. You, of course, in true Carissa fashion, bite his finger, nearly tearing it off. Or that's what would have happened if he weren’t wearing a fleece Medea fucking worked to steal for him.
“I hate to be the one to tell you this, but no one survives Scylla.” He kicks you. You tumble off the edge.
She watches you through the connection as you bleed into black, kneeling, nauseous, as the seeing glass of material reality fractures.
Head smashed against the side of the Argo before you can blink away. Somehow you're always too fucking slow. What a waste of breath and space.
Ripped to pieces by scylla’s many heads. Speed up asshole, and pull it off! Why are you not good enough?
You’re tired, sick with rage at the threads of fate for dooming you again and again. For torturing both your hearts. Furious at her for putting you through this maelstrom. Furious for causing your existence.
Some part of her still knows why she did this. You glimpse it now, in these threads inbetween. She is going to destroy her mother, once and for all. In that moment, the hate and rage you feel towards her decision ripples with understanding, regret, and grief that she must suffer like this to deal with fate.
Regret that she doesn't know she's made you, that this task is rendering you up to suffering.
She and you drown beneath the grief, the rage, the heartache at all these iterations of you both who will never know what she has. But that’s not her fate, she has a you, one who lived, and loves her. Part of you hates her for that. For making you, knowing you’ll never have her.
You’re doomed to dark agonizing silence and loneliness. All of the yous and hers you represent. And it's her fault. You should hate her, you want to, but you can't.
Some part of you knows that if she didn’t do this here, that her Mother would unfold fate before her when you both finally resolve everything.
Are you a projection of what she thinks you are? What she thinks you would be? Or are you really the sum of all these Dead Ends.
“Here I’m not ready! I truly wasn’t ready.”
“No-one could have been.” You want to reach out and hold her, but you can’t. You want to slap her a thousand times for the torture she's made for you. But you can't.
“I don’t know if I’ll be then either! What If I’m not?!”
Miscalculating the blink through reality, embedded in a rock. Your death is not quick.
No matter where she looks, it fills her vision. There’s nowhere to go. No way to escape. You take solace in that fact. It's a cruel, hateful solace, cold and the pang of cold self-hatred worms in your skull and belly.
You simply drown. How were you this inept in letting that happen? Why didn't you think to fucking blink.
Freezing to death before you reach shore. Maybe you deserve all these fates, with how often you're too fucking slow.
Your body lies on the deck, never even reaching the water. You are dead, and he drags your body before Medea, telling her she has nothing left but him.
In the river you rage, dragging spectral fingers through the silk, as your love kills him. Herself, the whole crew, and swallows the Argo forever in a tide of blood. The crimson wraith of the Mediterranean.
You feel her phantom reach out desperately, trying to grab your arm, pull you close. Her fingers pass through you like she’s a ghost before Cassandra can stop her. You know the truth, you're the ghost and she's the reality. You hear her scream, weeping, desperately wanting to hold you. Protect you in this moment before you’re in the black again.
You fall to your knees, and weep, desperately trying to reach for her phantom, and grasp her. Parts of you just wanting to being held, others wanting to rip apart her flesh.
But you are as helpless and powerless as she is here.
Reality tears apart in giant, bleeding holes, rippling outwards along the ontokinetic threads as all of you plunge into darkness, your combined cries echoing.
Medea’s heart lays on the floor of a place you don’t know. It's called the Silicon Nornir. She's grasping Cassandra’s hand tightly.
You come to Corinth, in hunters’ rags, searching for her desperately.
You confront him on the palace steps, screaming at Jason.
Your body lays on the steps. You are dead, and he did it right in front of Medea.
He holds her like you so desperately want to, but without love. He hispers sweet reassurances as you lay dying that you didn’t love her anymore. She is blinded by his love potions, swooning, even though the heart bleeds deeply in your ghostly Medea’s chest.
She retches on the ground as do you, gasping down air in disgust, shame, horror, burning with hate. Nothing comes up, you've both spent all your stomachs had to give.
You confront Medea in the Palace, among the sweeping marble columns painted gold, grandiose doors and murals all around us. You’re furious, grieving, deeply wounded and betrayed by her love for Jason. It sticks with you through the shared memory, and seeing them lovingly together.
“Why do you love him! After what he did to me?”
“You left me on the Argo! You abandoned me, after I gave you my heart the night after we left my Mother’s orchards behind.” This version of her is unreasonably angry, betrayed, murderous, heartbroken.
You say something cruel, that you don’t really mean.
“I want to scream.”
This Medea stabs you. Again, and again, ripping you open, screaming at you the whole time. You are dying, and all you wanted from her was to be held, was to figure out what had gone wrong.
When she comes to reality, realizes what she’s done, she weeps, as you die in her arms.
“Hey.” You say with your last rasping breaths. “It’s not your fault.” You splutter blood on her lap. You are dead again, so many thousands of times.
“When will it be over.” You lay, despondent in the black water of death between, watching the phantoms, watching her sob on the floor next to Cassandra. You want to sweep her up in your arms, making it all stop and go away.
But she is not yours to hold.
“The end is close.”
On the steps of the palace, in her arms. You are dead from a blade to the neck.
In the fields outside Corinth, speared through by Jason's cowardly heart. How did you not fucking see him coming? Why are you so useless?
Head crushed with Medea's censor. You just let it happen, so afraid to raise a hand against her.
Skin flayed off. You are dead and you have no other excuse for her cruelty.
Drained of blood. You are dead yet again, and she has become a vampire.
Sacrificed on a Corinthian altar. You can't remember how this death came.
Horrifically twisted and tortured, as she embraces her fate and you have nothing left to give.
You see them both now, less phantoms by the moment. Her tears stream in fat rivers down her face, eyes irritated and so very red.
“She told me once, she didn’t try to confront him in Corinth, cause her heart broke when she saw me kissing him,” Medea rasps out in your skull.
It’s true. Your heart shattered at Corinth. You should have walked away all these times, but you couldn’t. You don’t know why.
Cassandra says nothing.
Black Reality shears apart, riven by great roots of growing trees. In the forest, you weep on your knees before their trunks, broken by a love you never should have let in.
Vaporized into ash, smashed beneath falling rocks. You are dead, and a horizon is approaching beyond which you're not sure what comes next.
Obliterated by a stroke of lightning. Your death is only marked by an ashen silhouette on the forest floor. You could never escape this.
Crushed by falling trees, crimson stains smearing across the forest floor. No-one will ever find your body, because you're always too fucking slow.
Shorn apart by a thousand angry razors as Zeus decides to smite you instead of turning you into a Lion.
Somehow you know this part of your myth. Through her? You’re not sure, you’re not sure it matters anymore.
Her chest aches and so does yours from the gasps, eyes red and blurry, broken on the forest floor and the black river Styx. How much more can she take before she is irreprably broken? Before you are laying on the floor in babbling agony.
Hunters corner you. Dead before Artemis reaches you. Even as the greatest hunter, you're fucking uselessly inept.
Collapsing from exhaustion from running too long, reached by Artemis too late. You are dead against her mournful fingers, never fucking enough.
Conceptually flayed apart as the fusion with Artemis goes awry in a thousand tiny different ways. Your death leaves you nothing more than a legend. You're weak, impossibly helpless, unable to accept her gift.
And then, it’s done. Kneeling on the cold, black water of the Astral floor in an endless starry sky.
Here you lay staring up, a jigsaw of different yous from all those dead ends.
“We… were never meant to be, were we?” Medea asks very softly, sucking in air painfully. “This— us is a fluke.” She wraps her free arm around herself in your peripherals, squeezing tight as the tears don’t stop.
You weep with her, throat raw and acheing from all the screaming and yells across many thousands of fates.
“Why did I do this to myself? She warned me, and I didn’t listen.”
She should be grateful for how things worked out in her reality. She should feel love more strongly for her you than ever before, run home and grasp you in her arms, and never let go again. Her you was worth it, her you was strong enough, fast enough.
And you’re so fucking angry because as her eyes dry, all out of tears to cry, all she feels is crushing grief for you. For all of you Dead Ends, a word which you only know because of a term someone named Heather Garrison once used. You’ll never have the happiness they did, and you flitter between the ache of self-loathing for not being enough, and knowing fate hates you all the same.
Those versions of her where her mother will eventually win, where she lives a cold, miserable life to the end of her days alone.
This reality hates you both so much.
“Why do I exist if its meant to suffer?" you ask the stars above.
“The odds of you and your wife surviving past Apotheosis and meeting, whether on that initial voyage with the Finnfolk, or much later as opposed to not, are 3 to 1,” Cassandra says, as much to you, as it is to Medea.
You look at her, head jerking up, and realize her blind eyes are staring straight at you. A chill crawls up and down your jigsaw spine, as you realize she can see you.
Medea’s head jerks up to look at her.
“Surely she’s telling me lies.” She thinks through your connection. The Ontokinetic fabric begins to undulate around us.
“Wha—what?! But you ju—”
“Your intent in coming to me was to prepare yourself to face the revelations your mother will attempt to use to twist your perspective on reality and fate.” She taps her staff on the wooden floor of the forming Argo.
“Unlike your friend, the Black Queen, you and Carissa are not star crossed, doomed to never be in all but the most stringent conditions. In 15% of threads, Carissa, or you die before you meet, before you can fall in love, or before you can reach Apotheosis in your current lives. In 10%, neither of you meet, and you never reach apotheosis in your current lives. In 75% of threads, you will eventually meet, fall in love, and reach apotheosis. The Universe is, for lack of better terms, trying to mash you together.”
You reel, you are only 15% of threads. That’s—
“I can’t believe what she’s saying. How can—” Medea thinks through your threads.
“I see in your eyes that you don’t believe me.”
“How was that.” Both your heads jerk back around, to see Medea and you laying within the hold of the Argo. Jason is dead on the floor, body oozing an expanding pool of blood that seeps between the boards.
This Medea clings to Carissa, squeezing her as she gently strokes Medea’s face, both bare but covered in blankets. Warmth of love radiates off of them as you stare.
It shifts all around us with crescendos of harmonious threads.
Both of you, walking hand in hand along a beach, leaning against one another.
Again. Lying in the leaves of the forest floor, watching a herd of deer meander by.
Again. Leaning against each other in the Library, reading different books, Carissa’s quiet purrs gently vibrating you both.
Again. Laughing, and tossing bits of flour at each other in the kitchen as you cook.
Again. Laying together, staring up at a strange and alien sky.
You both gasp audibly, shaking, a storm of love, and longing and desperate burning passion tossing in your bellies.
Carissa, cradling in her arms a little girl, with Medea’s ears, and a mix of your hair and eyes.
Where she made us live perhaps 10s of thousands of scenes of death before, a flood of visions across time and eras of you both pressing together, falling in love, already in love, laying in woods, libraries, palaces, sandy beaches, savannahs, plains, rain forests, cities, skylines, sprawling space stations, alien worlds and suns all of it runs rampant through your combined mind’s eye. Millions of threads, and timelines, across space and distance.
The tears come again, they really shouldn’t because you’ve been weeping this whole time, but the joy blossoming in her heart is too much. She gasps desperately for air, reaching out to touch all the threads of these distant timelines.
But you feel hollow. Anger, sadness, rage, grief. The universe abandoned you, 75% does not encompass all of you. You are the trash, the stuff left behind in the gutter, forgotten about in the framework of other’s happiness. You were the threads that weren't good enough, and it consigned your love and fate to the conceptual woodchipper.
The shadow of all those dead threads hangs over your heads still as Medea hesitates. All those Medeas who never find the depths of love and happiness the rest of them hold in their hearts. All those Carissa’s who are born to suffer and die.
“What about the Dead Ends?” She asks Cassandra very quietly, sniffling hard. She leans into this woman staring at you with blind eyes, who towers nearly a head over her, legs weak and trembling from all the emotions.
Despite the fact that she walked this path and woke you as a single gestalt of all those horrendous fates, you still love her. Even if you, the collective you, will never have her.
“Are they all doomed to never have what I do, fated to suffer in darkness, alone, be consumed by—” She retches at the thought for several moments before croaking it out. “By my mother? To never know the love and joy I have in my soul?”
Cassandra smiles softly as we float through the burning fires of the astral sea and slowly raises her hand.
She snaps.
You stand in a well decorated café with them. Menus hang in outcrops on the wall, chairs, tables, and multiple counters scattered about. The colors are cozy, warm and welcoming. Signs hang from doors and windows greeting customers and advertising weekly specials. Small sandwich boards in the windows, and on little display stands next to the roped line for the counter.
You stare, eyes wide at the woman behind the counter, this mirror of you—No, you realize. This is you, you feel her reality bleeding into your gestalt mind. You take a step back, watching. She has tired eyes but a smiling expression as she serves a faceless customer obscured by the vision.
The door rings, and in walks—
You blink and rub your eyes in unison with Medea before looking again, as another Medea walks through the door.
She’s me, as I think I probably would have been without my mother’s interference. Medea’s thoughts bounce in your skull.
Dark freckles against olive skin, an imperfectly cute little round chin. Bown hair with purple tips, pointed ears, and lilac symbols swimming across her free form.
The Carissa she approaches stands up a little straighter out of her slouch, a moment of slacking gone in an instant.
Cassandra speaks quietly as time slows for a moment. “In 25% of universal threads, where you two do not survive, do not live to know one another in your current lives, your reincarnations will meet.”
Your eyes widen, on the verge of weeping. Hope springs in your gestalt chest, as it does in Medea’s.
“Hey, what can I get you.”
You both stare in shock, as her reincarnation in turn stares at Carissa’s feline ears, only to look away after a moment with a hint of embarrassment across her cheeks.
“Just a Mocha please.”
“Coming right up.” Carissa half turns to the machine, and then pauses, looking back. “Say, I don’t wanna come off as rude but what accent is that?”
I’m not sure what to make of this chatty, socially buzzing version of my wife. Is this an act? What she would have been like if she hadn’t endured what she did? Medea questions internally.
You’re not sure either.
“Georgian.”
You both double blink, gawking.
“Oh, cool.”
“The country, not the sta— cool?”
“Yeah. Don’t get many folks at Deer college from your part of the world.”
“…is your accent Greek?”
“Yeah.”
An awkward silence hangs between them.
“Oh, can I get a name for that order?”
“Medea.”
“Wait, really? Like the Greek Enchantress.”
“Yeah.” Medea gives Carissa a slightly exhausted look.
Carissa winces. “Shit, sorry, bet you get that all the time.”
“Yes, and with my country’s complicated relationship with her—” Medea stops, closing her eyes and breathing in, then out. “Its fine.”
“Are you a student at Deer? Or just visiting?” Carissa asks, almost ensorcelled by this version of Medea, as she preps the mocha. Phantom Medea and your lips tremble, as your summoner realizes the shine in this manifestation of you’s eyes resembles hers. “Should be ready for your paychip.”
“Just started in the Arcane studies PhD program.” Medea slides a card into the square electronic device.
“Oh cool. Bet you got steady funding.” The device beeps.
“We do. What about you? You in a program?”
“Oh, yeah. PhD in anomalous math towards applied thaumaturgical physics… no funding in my field, so here I am, as a fucking barista.” Carissa walks over, punches several buttons on the register with a finger ending in a very claw-like nail. “You want your receipt?”
“No that’s fine.” A pause. “My condolences. You must be good at math though?” Medea offers as if it’s a consolation.
“Polymath, could have done the smart thing and gone into real anomalous physics, but I’m a rebel.” Carissa slides the cup over the counter carefully, after putting a heat protector on it, to Medea. “Careful, it’s hot.”
Medea tilts her head to one side, grabbing a few napkins to pick it up, missing the heat protector.
“Being a rebel can be fun I suppose…” Beat, as Medea wraps up her drink. As you stand there in shock, watching, beyond all words. “Well… I don’t think I caught your name?”
“Carissa.” Your otherworld doppleganger leans on the counter, giving a patently tired but enamored smile. By the way Medea’s eyes burn, you know that she is intrigued and distracted all the same.
How else do you possibly explain her missing the heat protector?
“Well, Carissa, I will see you on campus or here?” There’s a quiet lilt to her voice.
“Sure, more likely here. If I’m on campus, I’m in a poorly lit room with a whiteboard.” The awkward laugh at her own joke fades into static as reality trickles apart.
As you start to come apart, you smile at Cassandra.
You’re convinced.
You know you can bleed into your counterpart here completely and be happy. You know where this is going. You were wrong about Fate's intentions, and this was more than enough to show you what comes next. Where this is always bound to go.
You’re sad that this is how it came about, but happy, that it came about at all.
Cassandra smiles softly at you, putting a finger up against her lips, as if in acknowledgement of what she put you through.
But her work isn’t done, and neither truly is yours.
Phantom Medea still needs to be convinced. This is her story now.
“Good luck, and I love you,” you say with tears in your eyes, knowing she can’t hear you.
But she looks at you finally, with wide, scared and surprised eyes.
And all you can do in these final moments of gestalt existence is burst into quiet tears.
“And in these threads where they meet again, they become friends.”
We flutter through a scene, my doppelganger and hers, sitting and talking as Carissa moves between wiping down tables at closing.
I’m stunned by what I saw, the fading phantom vision of some gestalt amalgamation of the dead ends of my wife. I don’t know what I’ve just seen in those spaces in-between, but it felt—
Sad. Agonizingly bittersweet and melancholy.
Yet happy all the same. I wipe my face, tears leaking from my eyes, like I just lost someone I've known across many lifetimes.
Though my heart aches, I try to focus on the unfolding vision.
Sitting across from each other during breaks, talking about studies.
Sitting in the grass just outside the shop, enjoying the afternoon sun.
My counterpart building the courage to ask her out on a first date, Carissa misreading, talking about how hanging out over dinner is cool.
The tears come harder now, heavier as I realize what’s happening. So, this is what it would have been like, had we lived semi-normal lives? This awkward intimacy of friendship that we missed out on?
“And where they become friends, they become best friends.”
A first concert where Medea buys her Carissa protective ear plugs for her ears. Tail bags to hold snacks and medicine and other considerate things.
A fancy dinner in an uptown restaurant, hoping for a first kiss that doesn’t come.
A night spent in Medea’s apartment, watching movies, ending with my counterpart inviting Carissa into her bed, hoping the signal will be clear.
But nothing happens.
One night over dinner, Carissa relays to my counterpart. “Hey, I’m probably going to miss the next few shifts. I have a big exam coming up that’s going to determine when I eventually defend, and I really need to crack down and study a lot. I’m having trouble with some of the conceptual problems that I just need full time and focus to nail, so I probably won’t be around the next few weeks when you’re studying.”
And all my counterpart said was “Alright.”
No good luck.
No I’ll be rooting for you.
For a minute, I thought she was giving up, because Cassandra said nothing.
I could feel my heart tearing itself apart, wanting to scream at her to be more assertive, to tell Carissa how she feels. Strange how it feels, to be on the outside looking in. The internet has a term for this, shipping I think its called.
Then reality flickers again, and we are standing in a poorly lit room with a whiteboard scrawled with equations, calculations, and half-finished problems. My heart aches as I watch Carissa’s doppelganger stare up at it all, with a dim look of near defeat. Far too many cups of empty coffee next to her.
“I’m going to fail,” she says softly. Soft tears ripple down her cheeks, dripping onto the floor and I want to reach out and pull her close. Reassure her where my counterpart has fucking failed.
And then the door to the room bursts open with a quite sudden pop, making us both snap our heads towards the source.
I want to scream as my doppleganger marches down the aisle of this strange auditorium pulling a cart with a carboy of coffee, boxes of donuts and sandwiches and multiple theoretical math textbooks.
“I come bearing humanitarian aid to your war on the mind and math!” she declares with the biggest shit eating grin I’ve ever seen run across my lips.
Carissa stares, between the cart, the boxes, the coffee, the textbooks, and my doppelganger, flustered, surprised, and starting to laugh and cry fully out of relief and frustration and hope.
“Woah, this is— super nice of you. Medea you didn’t have to do this, I, damn. Damn. Damn, you don’t know how much I needed this right now. Seriously thank you.” She rubs the tears from her face with the backs of her hands, shivering in the chair.
I want to scream, shout, chest acheing as she finally does the thing she should have and uses the words. She needs to do more but gods damn it feels good to finally hear her say the right thing as she waves off Carissa’s thanks.
“It’s a study date!” Her voice is more than a bit amorous in its affection, sending my own heart afluttering.
And then Carissa does something that makes me groan as she blushes.
“What? Hahahhaha,” she laughs it off. “Why’d you say that like we’re dating?”
This is the same girl who notices every bird and squirrel and weird cryptid in the parks. How is she this blind!!!
Medea stops right in front of her, looking up at my wife’s doppelganger, staring with a look of indescribable disbelief.
“Carissa… we’ve been on ten dates. I asked you to come sleep in my bed.”
I have only ever seen my wife ever get as red as the doppelganger does now in the deepest throes of our affection.
Carissa stammers. “O—h oh my gods. Oh my god’s we’ve. I’ve—”
“And where they become best friends, they fall in love,” Cassandra finally says, smiling softly in my peripherals.
I actually scream with joy now, physically and mentally as this me, this Medea seizes Carissa’s hand with one of her own. She pulls it back down and away from her face before it can fully cover her eyes. The entire time staring into her eyes.
Medea gently grabs Carissa’s chin, pulls her down, and kisses her, purple writhing across my doppelganger’s skin with lilac fire as they hold there for an eternity.
I’m crying, tears worming down my cheeks.
I barely hear my doppelgangers voice as the kiss breaks, as she says “Now, no girlfriend of mine is going to fail anything. Explain everything to me, and I shall be what you were to me for my Qualifying exam.”
Reality trickles back in slowly, neon of the Nornir pulsing beneath us as their voices fade into the distance.
My chest aches, burning with each gasping breath as I let go of Cassandra as the visions fade, pressing my hands to my face.
This is ugly, I’m raw, so broken down and vulnerable, but I don’t fucking care. It’s beautiful, sad. Raw joy mixes with a profound melancholy in my stomach and bones as I kneel, then sit on the floor and cry.
Cassandra’s hand gently rests on my back as she sits on the neon floor next to me. Tiny machines worm across the neon tile to clean up the bile I retched onto the floor. Some squeak at me comfortingly as I sob quietly.
“Thank you Cassandra.” Fat tears hit the floor streaking off my cheeks.
“I warned you that this process is not for the faint of heart,” she murmurs softly in reply. “But now, now I think you’re ready to face the tyranny of your mother.”
We sit there for a long time, together, as I quietly cry.
Onwards into infinity it seems as the events replay in my head.
Finally, I wipe my eyes, trying to pull myself together, sniffling.
Only to fall down into another small fit of crying.
It takes several more tries before I regain the courage to speak.
I realize, I never responded to her statement.
“To quote my wife, ‘fuck that, I’m going home to relax first.’” My voice is a hoarse croak from the screaming, and the crying but I don’t care. I laugh at my own joke, full bellied, hiccupping down painful gasps from the aches of my chest, using it to mask the residual fear that tries to claw its way back.
Cassandra laughs too, and gently hugs me in the crimson, neon light.
The universe is on my side.
It has proclaimed that we are meant to be, that our souls are intertwined and meant to mesh.
And that is enough to give me the strength to end my mother.
But that is a tale for another day.
I don’t know what comes next, or what’s going to happen when I return to Georgia. I just know that I only want one thing at this moment.
The sun hangs low in the sky, framing the woods next to our carefully obscured driveway just west of the beach as I pull down the dirt path on the purple motor-scooter Carissa bought me a few years back. The helmet, a custom-made gift from my wife to accommodate my ears, comes off easily enough as I pull in quietly to our small garage.
Carissa is not one for vehicles, but she does have one. Her motorcycle is big but quiet, a new sleek electric model, covered in dust from its only incidental, off-road use. I glance about, unzipping the riding suit, half expecting her to already be out here, sorting through our stacks of mementos in search of something.
She’s not here, so I unstrap the large and small wrapped boxes bound to the bike. I trudge out of the garage and into the larger building complex. I check her workshop first, but the lights are off, her myriad array of nasty experimental traps hung up. Her tools are neatly arranged in precise mathematical distances, as she’s always want to do.
I check her forge and smithy next, but the hearth is unlit, the hammers all hung up, and the quenches all lidded.
I check my workshop next, but she isn’t lingering among my shelves of herbs and chemical reagents. Not a thing is out of order. Nor is she in my arcane study, with its library of precisely organized and alphabetized grimoires.
Nor is she in my shrine to the Font, not that she would ever venture there to begin with.
Humming to myself, I leave the building, and trudge through the woods. The sound of evening insects buzz in my ear, the cry of a kiwi somewhere in the distance, and the slosh of waves growing closer. Down our little cobblestone path, I emerge out from the woodline of our property and make my way towards the heart of our fortress, the cottage on stilts we’ve called home for almost a century now.
The lights are on, and as I approach, the smell of Carissa’s heavily modified, Ancient Egyptian Moussaka wafts through the air and my heart skips several beats.
She remembered!
I’m at the steps before I know it, carried faster forwards by anticipation and excitement for my favorite dish. That deep, passionate, desperate love. I pause just before the door, carefully leaning the presents against the cottage’s outer wall, before quietly opening the outer screen door. It’s easy enough to quietly push in the kitchen entrance.
The real question is whether she heard or not?
Carissa’s humming fills my ears, as she chops vegetables and prepares side dishes for the coming meal. She glows warmly in the fluorescent lights, blood locks framed by the orange incandescence, ears drooping in a relaxed position, tail flicking in contentment back and forth.
Somehow, impossibly, I’ve fooled her ears. I grin to myself.
I could stand here for an eternity and just drink in the sight of her, but I want more.
I consider the approach. To the winds with it.
Slipping out of my boots, like sliding off a second skin, I let the fishnet stockings cushion me from the floor. I sneak and wait until she doesn’t have the knife in her hands. That would be unpleasant if I startled her.
Then I quietly wrap my arms around her waist, pressing my lips gently to her neck and kiss softly. There’s a millisecond of tension as she freezes at my touches. Then instant relaxation, her muscles uncoiling against me, leaning back into my chest. I soak in her warmth, bask in the power and strength of her back muscles, blush and bite down more aggressive thoughts as her tail coils snugly around my waist.
She smells of coconuts and caramel, as I bury my face in a sheet of her hair. She’s recently showered. I emerge a second later to kiss the soft sensitive flesh of her neck, skin buttery smooth from lotions that linger in my nostrils.
Buh-dum buh-dum buh-dum pounds in my eardrums from my own heart, butterflies rippling in my stomach as we rock gently back and forth.
“Hi,” I say softly, kissing her neck again.
“Hi yourself,” she purrs, practically singing back to me. Her voice is as sweet and harmonious as a thousand choirs, burning inside my skull as the day’s events play again and again in my mind.
I’m crying, I realize, tears worming down my cheeks gently, as she nuzzles back against my face, and notices.
“Babe, you’re crying, are you ok?” she asks so very gently, a pang of concern in her voice that tears me apart at the very seams.
“Sorry I jus—” I almost choke on the words, shivering against her strength, her comfort, the security I feel in this moment. “I just missed you.”
It’s been a month since we came back from my aunt’s island. But it still feels like only yesterday that we were pulled apart, and today made it feel even more recent in my mind’s eye, however it ended.
She sets down what she is holding, and turns gently in my grasp, and wraps me with those powerful arms. My heart flutters and I press my face into her chest, shivering, jamming my face into the fluffy tuft of her chest fur through the half-buttoned jacket top.
“It was only a day love,” she coos softly with reassurance, “but you’re home now. I have you. I’m here.” We rock in place, as I shiver against her, feeling safe, untouchable in this precious moment of calm and peace in our turbulent lives.
A part of me, bigger than I care to admit, craves the intimacy and ease and softness of that other life I was shown today. To only have to worry about tests and degrees. That seems like a softer, simpler, happier life in many respects.
Perhaps, the Dead Ends were the lucky ones. But that’s wishing for the easy path. There is merit to the journey we have walked… and I think if I had the choice, I’d do things this way again.
It’s been worth it, for 5000 years with her.
I pull my head back to look up and into her eyes. She wipes my face, gently as she did so long ago; the first time we ever shared a bed, so very carefully clearing my tears.
My hand moves with a mind of its own, gently cupping her cheek, and I pull her down into a soft kiss.
It does now, as it has ever done across five million separate kisses in all our lives. Lights burn across my skin in lilac wonder, fireworks dancing behind my closed eyes as I press into her desperately. Drinking in her affection, the way her tongue presses in against mine, the stolen warmth of each other’s increasingly more ragged breaths.
My eyes flutter open for an instant when we come up for breath to check the timer.
40 minutes left.
The presents, the Moussaka, the vegetables, sides, the planning, the cats, scheduling a meeting with Moose, bills, insurance, mundane affairs, all of it can wait.
We have plenty of time. These other things can wait; time is mine to command. Here, now, I need her touch, her life, affection, warmth, strength and her love. I need all of her, and I shall give her all of me.
Maybe, maybe I shall linger in this moment in time for a week, a month, a year.
She smiles with hooded eyes between my desperate kisses. Our breaths are fast and shallow. I push us, guide us out of the kitchen, through the hall, and down to the bedroom, skin flaring with light as the door shuts behind us.
Tonight is the anniversary of our very first kiss and I’m going to make it count.
In so many universes this life didn’t make it so.
I’ll never make that mistake again.
The universe wants our love to shine.
If our love can shine, so can yours.
Happy Pride.